As advancements in the provision of on-demand content delivery and IP content delivery have occurred, many customers of cable and/or other content broadcast services expect to be able to receive content on a number of different devices associated with their customer account.
While broadcast content such as that provided to set top boxes according to a TV broadcast schedule are broadcast at a predictable time, many IP based and on-demand based content delivery services provide content on demand, e.g., in response to a user request.
While the servers may be synchronized to a common time clock such as a GPS signal based network time clock or another universal time clock, even if content is transmitted at the same time it may be delivered via different networks resulting in different transmission delays.
Because of the difference in transmission delays, different devices corresponding to a customer at the same household may receive content corresponding to a program in a manner that is time shifted and not synchronized due to the differences in the network content delivery paths. As a user changes from one device to another, e.g., as the user moves from a living room with a STB that receives broadcast content and moves to another room and seeks to receive the remainder of a program via IP delivery on a mobile device or another IP device, the user will normally notice a difference in the point at which the program is being provided to the different devices because of platform and/or network differences associated with the different devices.
In order for a customer to assume a smooth experience when switching between different devices while watching a program, it would be desirable if methods and/or apparatus could be developed which would allow the customer to received content in a manner that is synchronized across the customers devices without the customer having to take into consideration content delivery differences between different devices or the type of communications network being used to deliver the content to the user.
It should be appreciated that there is a need for methods and apparatus which can be used to allow a user viewing content on a first device to continue viewing the same content on one or more devices associated with the customer account in a synchronized manner providing the user consistent and seamless viewing experience across multiple devices.